quiz night

Last night I was inducted to Brit culture with a proper Pub Quiz night at the Prom pub, which is basically, just across the street from our house. Ben, Jess, Anja and I went out and it was such a fun night… they were quite surprised to find that we don’t really do quiz nights in Canada, and I was pleasantly surprised to see how popular an event it was.

Apparently you can find a quiz night every night of the week in a pub near you if you look for it. The topic of the night was music, and unfortunately I wasn’t too helpful because the questions were very U.K. centered, but when it came to knowing the release dates of a number of famous albums it turns out that my Social History of Popular Music course came in quite handy. It also helped that I knew Canadian music, though I wasn’t so proud to know trivia about Alanis Morisette and especially not Shania Twain.

It was really nice to go out with the housemates to pass a fun (and cheap) Tuesday night. Between the pint of cider and our entry in the game I only spent about £3.00 and it was tons of fun.

Basically there were about 20 teams and an announcer asks the questions or plays the sound clips that have to be identified… from there you write down the answers and after each round exchange sheets with another table for marking. We did fairly well, but not well enough to win any of the prizes, and not so poorly that we won for lowest score… still it was a good effort on all accounts.

My housemates are really loving the Canadian Music that I have been slowly spreading throughout the house; they are especially fond of Hawksley Workman and Metric, which are a little more outside the genre of music which is most popular in Britain right now. Tonight we are all making a big pizza together, so that should be fun – everyone’s schedules are a bit scattered but it seems that one or twice a week some sort of plan is laid out that involves cooking and we all get together. So that’s been really nice.

Things at work are going really well. We are doing a run through of the tour script that I wrote for the building, so it will be a real test today to see some reactions to the work I’m doing. I’m also crossing my fingers that I might be able to spend the day out of the office researching at the University on Friday or if not, early next week.

Unfortunately I don't have time for much more of an update.

Oh yeah, I've randomly picked up a wireless internet signal in my house... I'm not sure if it part of the city's wireless internet plan (a large part of the city is covered by a free open wireless network run by the City Council) or if it is a neighbor's connection. The hubs all run down the major streets and the network I am connected to is named after a street nearby so I'm tempted to think that it's part of the city plan... in which case I'm actually welcome to use it. The connection isn't the greatest, but it works well enough. Pretty soon we'll have our own internet connection wireless throughout our house so I'll be able to connect at a faster speed then.

- Chris